Tirill
A Dance With The Shadows
The Wild Places

This album is a couple of years old. It really doesn't matter. Tirill told us she only recently started to promote the album in Norway. And the music is more out of time/timeless/classic than most other albums in the pop-rock genre these days, anyway.

Judging from the cover and the music, Tirill seems to be a kind of supernatural female creature from the Nordic folklore, looking like a beautiful maiden, though sway-backed and with a cow's tail, who - with her singing - tries to entice young men deeper and deeper into the woods and make them prisoners inside a mountain or a hill for the rest of their lives. In this respect, Tirill might remind of a younger sister of Kari Rueslåtten (Norwegian solo artist and ex-member of progressive metallic 3rd And The mortal). Tirill's lyrics are a bit more everyday-like, though, dealing with love lost or found, longing, trees, nature and the changing of the seasons. The music is acoustic based, some melancholic in the folk singer songwriter tradition, others more in the pop vein.

A Dance With The Shadows is Tirill Mohn's first solo album. She was a member of one of Norway's finest progressive acts in recent years, White Willow. Her album includes a host of guest musicians. Quite a few of them have been involved in the fluctuating line-ups of White Willow. Tirill treats several instruments herself, including guitars, violins, flutes, keyboards and percussion. Her voice is lightweight and fragile, at times monotonous. Occasionally her singing reminds me of two of Scandinavia's most distinctive female voices, Norwegian Anneli Drecker (of Bel Canto fame) and Swedish Stina Nordenstam. The similarities are not that obvious, though. It probably has to do with some Nordic characteristics.

"Golds Of Morning", the catchiest pop song of the album, suits all seasons. The rest of Tirill's melancholic and mainly calm songs are specially suited for long and dark autumn and winter nights. By now it's midsummer on the northern hemisphere and we hardly have any darkness at all up here in the far north. I guess A Dance With The Shadows will not be my first choice of albums to play for the next couple of months. However, it will surely make the eventual coming of autumn and winter easier to endure.

You can find out more about Tirill and how to order her album at her own or The Wild Places sites.

Copyright © 2005 JP